Nikocado Avocado has pulled off a yearslong prank.
The popular mukbang YouTuber, known for eating enormous amounts of food on camera, fooled the internet by completing a secret weight loss journey while uploading old videos to mask his progress.
Nikocado Avocado, whose real name is Nicholas Perry, revealed his new look — a drastically slimmer appearance compared with his look in his other recent YouTube videos — to millions of subscribers Friday.
“Today, I woke up from a very long dream, and I also woke up having lost 250 pounds off of my body. And just yesterday, people were calling me fat and sick and boring and irrelevant,” Perry, 32, said in his latest video. “People are the most messed-up creatures on the entire planet, and yet I’ve still managed to stay two steps ahead of everyone. The joke’s on you.”
The video, titled “Two Steps Ahead,” got more than 26 million views over the weekend. It drew a flurry of speculation around whether he could have achieved such extreme weight loss in the months since his most recent uploads, all of which showed him at a considerably larger size.
Perry said by email that it took about two years to lose the weight, going from 411 pounds at his heaviest to 158 pounds today.“I have been strategically posting pre-recorded videos for 2 years, on both YouTube and TikTok. I edited the videos so that they would appear recent, allowing me to focus on healing my body behind the scenes,” Perry wrote in an email. “I shaved my head so that people wouldn’t recognize me in public. A handful of fellow YouTubers also helped to keep my secret.”
Opening the video with a giant panda mask on his head, he called his quiet transformation the “greatest social experiment of my entire life.” He told viewers that watching internet users’ continual comments and speculation about him felt as if he were “monitoring ants on an ant farm.”
The panda, according to Perry, was meant to symbolize how the “world of social media is not as black-and-white as it appears.” His aim, he wrote, was to remind people not to take the internet so seriously.
“While everybody pointed and laughed at me for over-consuming food, I was in total control the entire time,” Perry wrote. “In reality, people are completely absorbed with Internet personalities and obsessively watch their content. That is where a deeper level of over-consumption lies — and it’s the parallel I wanted to make.”
After the big unveil, Perry dived back into his usual mukbang content, finishing the video by clearing out a massive tray of spicy black bean noodles.
His video, however, shared many of the same lines from a similar monologue he uploaded in February 2022. That video, originally titled “The Best Burger I’ve Ever Had,” has since been retitled to “Two Steps Ahead • Original, 2022.”
Perry wrote in the email that he had scripted the clip knowing he was about to embark on his secret weight loss journey.